In these palaces, and in the homes of the rich, a hundred arts were employed to make everything if not beautiful, at least expensive. The floors were often of polychrome marble, or mosaics whose patient combination of tiny varicolored cubes (tesserae) resulted in paintings of remarkable realism and permanence. Furniture was less abundant and comfortable than among ourselves, but of generally superior design and workmanship. Tables, chairs, benches, couches, beds, lamps, and utensils were made of lasting materials, and lavishly adorned; the best wood, ivory, marble, bronze, silver, and gold were carefully turned and finished, decorated with plant or animal forms, or inlaid with ivory, tortoise shell, chased bronze, or precious stones. Tables were sometimes cut from costly cypress or citrus woods; some were of gold or silver; many were of marble or bronze. Chairs were of every sort from folding stool to throne, but less calculated than ours to deform the spine. Beds were of wood or metal, with slim but sturdy legs often ending in an animal’s head or foot; a bronze web, instead of a spring, supported a mattress filled with straw or wool. Bronze tripods of elegant form took the place of our end tables; and here and there were cabinets with pigeonholes for rolled books. Bronze braziers warmed the rooms, and bronze lamps lighted them. Mirrors too were of bronze, highly polished, embossed or engraved with floral or mythical designs; some were made horizontally or vertically convex or concave to distort reflections into a humorous slenderness or rotundity.17
The factories of Campania working with the rich output of Spanish mines, produced silverware on a large scale for a wide market; silver services were now common in the middle and upper classes. In 1895 an excavator found in the cistern of a villa at Boscoreale a remarkable collection of silver, apparently deposited there by its owner before his unsuccessful flight from the embers of Vesuvius in A.D. 79. One of the sixteen cups bears an almost perfect representation of simple foliage; two depict skeletons in high relief; another pictures Augustus enthroned between Venus and Mars, the rival deities of mankind; the sliest shows Zeno the Stoic pointing with scorn at Epicurus, who is helping himself to a huge piece of cake, while a pig, with uplifted foreleg, politely asks for a share.
The coins and gems of the early Empire prove the progress of the engraver’s art. Those of Augustus show the same good taste, sometimes the same designs, as the Altar of Peace. Precious stones imported from Africa, Arabia, and India were cut and set into rings, brooches, necklaces, bracelets, cups, even into walls. A ring on at least one finger was a social necessity; a few fops wore rings on all fingers but one. The Roman sealed his signature with his ring and therefore liked to have the seal individually designed. Some of the best-paid artists in Rome were gem cutters, like the Dioscurides who made Augustus’ seal. In cutting cameos the Golden Age reached a level never surpassed; the gemma Augusta in Vienna is among the finest in existence. To collect gems and cameos became a hobby of rich Romans—Pompey, Caesar, Augustus; by inheritance the imperial gem cabinet grew till Marcus Aurelius sold it to help pay for his war against the Marcomanni. From the official guardian of the imperial seals and gems England derived her Keeper of the Great, or Privy, Seal.
Meanwhile the potters of Capua, Puteoli, Cumae, and Arretium were filling Italian homes with every variety of ceramic art. Arretium had mixing vats with a capacity of 10,000 gallons. Its red-glazed tableware was for a century the most widely spread product of Italy; specimens of it have been found almost everywhere. Iron stamps, hollowed out in relief, were used to impress upon each vase, lamp, or tile the name of the maker, sometimes also the names of the year’s consuls, as a date. To this degree the ancients knew the art of printing; they left it undeveloped because slave copyists were cheap.18
From pottery the workers of Cumae, Liternum, and Aquileia turned to the production of artistic glass.III The Portland Vase is a famous example of its kind;IV finer still is the “Blue Glass Vase” found at Pompeii, depicting in lively and graceful action a vintage feast of Bacchus.19 In the reign of Tiberius, say Pliny and Strabo,20 the art of glass blowing was brought from Sidon or Alexandria to Rome, and soon produced polychrome phials, cups, bowls, and other forms of such delicate beauty that they became for a time the favorite prey of art collectors and millionaires. In Nero’s reign 6000 sesterces were paid for two small cups of blown glass now known as millefiori, or “thousand flowers,” produced by fusing together differently colored glass rods. Even more prized were the “Murrhine” vases imported from Asia and Africa. They were made by placing white and purple glass filaments side by side to form a desired pattern, and then firing them; or pieces of colored glass were embedded in a transparent white body. Pompey brought some to Rome after his victory over Mithridates; Augustus, though he melted down Cleopatra’s gold plate, kept for himself her goblet of Murrhine glass. Nero paid a million sesterces for one such cup; Petronius, dying, broke another lest it should fall into Nero’s hands. All in all, the Romans have had no superior in making glass; and there are few art collections in the world more precious than those of Roman glass in the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.